Abstract

This study aims at contributing to an overview of the process of transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish nation-state in the life story of an Armenian personality (Berç Türker-Keresteciyan). While his election as a deputy among the minorities in the single party era seemed to be already promising, the period he lived through consolidated the suggestion to study his life sfory. As an extension of the general and large questions for the conduct of this research, the major concern for me was to contribute to the limits and possibilities of different destinations for the non-Muslim subjects of the Ottoman Empire in the process of transition to a nation state. This question was reduced in this study to a single spectacle of how the relationship or connection of an Armenian individual would be transformed to his community constituted by religious belongingness, his state, his society in general in his life story including serious ruptures in terms of these surroundings. The single spectacle of a life story may help us in understanding different aspects of the voyage of non-Muslims from the empire to the nation state. There are main 5 sub-questions to be answered in this study. The first is the chanells through which a non-Muslim individual could surpass the communal ties in which the individual was bom in a late Ottoman context. The second may be how a non-Muslim individual could relate individually to the Ottoman realm and how the perceptions of such an individual about the state and the society could be framed. The third question is how the perceptions of such an individual could be shaped about the emerging nationalisms and what may the possible destinations for such an individual be. In relation to this question, how could one possibly went through these options and stuck to an option and which factors could affect the critical decisions for such an individual. As a last question, how the boundaries to move in for such an individual would be drawn in the formation and consolidation processes of the nation-state.